At Nationwide Children's Hospital, Paola Malerba is studying sleep rhythms in the human brain. Sleep helps us embed our memories in our understanding of the world. Specific brain oscillations found during sleep are crucial for this process, and their presence and coordination across brain regions promotes memory performance. Furthermore, non-invasive sleep interventions including targeted memory reactivation (with sound) and transcranial electrical stimulation (aiming at specific brain waves) are capable to enhance sleep oscillations and memory and motor performance. However, it is unknown how these rhythms emerge, organize or how they mediate memory consolidation. In recent work (Sleep 2018), Paola and collaborators have introduced a data-driven EEG analysis method to classify sleep slow oscillations (SOs, a hallmark of deep sleep) depending on their topography on the electrode manifold. This work is opening a new line of research: introducing a new theory of sleep-dependent consolidation in the presence of brain injury, disease or degeneration. Studying how sleep oscillations changes in these conditions can provide insights on how sleep rhythms influence memory consolidation, and at the same time open avenues for interventions aimed at ameliorating the consequences of brain injuries/disease on cognition and motor skills.
Publications
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Antonioni A, Galluccio M, Baroni A, Fregna G, Pozzo T, Koch G, Manfredini F, Fadiga L, Malerba P, Straudi S. Event-related desynchronization during action observation is an early predictor of recovery in subcortical stroke: An EEG study. Ann Phys Rehabil Med. 2024 Mar 12; 67: 101817.
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Alipour M, Seok S, Mednick SC, Malerba P. A classification-based generative approach to selective targeting of global slow oscillations during sleep. Front Hum Neurosci. 2024; 18: 1342975.
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Simon KC, Cadle C, Nakra N, Nagel MC, Malerba P. Age-associated sleep spindle characteristics in Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Sleep Adv. 2024; 5: zpae015.
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Antonioni A, Galluccio M, Toselli R, Baroni A, Fregna G, Schincaglia N, Milani G, Cosma M, Ferraresi G, Morelli M, Casetta I, De Vito A, Masiero S, Basaglia N, Malerba P, Severini G, Straudi S. A Multimodal Analysis to Explore Upper Limb Motor Recovery at 4 Weeks After Stroke: Insights From EEG and Kinematics Measures. Clin EEG Neurosci. 2023 Oct 19; 15500594231209397.
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Milani G, Antonioni A, Baroni A, Malerba P, Straudi S. Relation Between EEG Measures and Upper Limb Motor Recovery in Stroke Patients: A Scoping Review. Brain Topogr. 2022 Sep 22;
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Niknazar H, Malerba P, Mednick SC. Slow oscillations promote long-range effective communication: The key for memory consolidation in a broken-down network. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2022 Jun 28; 119: e2122515119.
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Malerba P, Whitehurst L, Mednick SC. The space-time profiles of sleep spindles and their coordination with slow oscillations on the electrode manifold. Sleep. 2022 Jun 6;
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Seok SC, McDevitt E, Mednick SC, Malerba P. Global and non-Global slow oscillations differentiate in their depth profiles. Front Netw Physiol. 2022; 2: 947618.
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Simon KC, Malerba P, Nakra N, Harrison A, Mednick SC, Nagel M. Slow oscillation density and amplitude decrease across development in pediatric Duchenne and Becker muscular dystrophy. Sleep. 2021 Apr 9; 44:
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Sanda P, Malerba P, Jiang X, Krishnan GP, Gonzalez-Martinez J, Halgren E, Bazhenov M. Bidirectional Interaction of Hippocampal Ripples and Cortical Slow Waves Leads to Coordinated Spiking Activity During NREM Sleep. Cereb Cortex. 2021 Jan 1; 31: 324-340.
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